Geraldine Gorman is an Assistant Professor in the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds an MA in English Literature and a PhD in Nursing, both from Loyola University, Chicago. Prior to entering the nursing profession in 1991, she taught writing as a teaching assistant at Loyola University. She also worked in direct social services, living in community at the Little Brothers of the Poor and participating in all aspects of their service to low-income elderly. In this capacity she also facilitated poetry workshops in nursing homes, resulting in two small anthologies of collected work. She was a founding member of a small grass roots organization in Tempe, AZ that served the needs of the many relocated elderly and she organized the local university community to provide, among other services, respite care for the spouses of Alzheimer victims. Before beginning nursing school, Gerry served as the volunteer coordinator and editorial assistant to H.O.M.E, a nonprofit housing organization for Chicago’s low-income elderly.

Her areas of clinical nursing practice included oncology, community health and, most recently, hospice and palliative care. Before coming to UIC in 2002, she taught at Western Michigan University. In her role as faculty in College of Nursing at UIC, Gerry teaches the introductory undergraduate nursing course as well as community health and assessment courses on both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her particular area of interest is the inclusion and infusion of the humanities into nursing curriculum and she organized and facilitates non-credit writing groups for students interested in understanding the health care experience through personal reflection. She has been awarded several writing residencies at Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL where she has been able to pursue her own interest in creative nonfiction. Areas of volunteer service include meal delivery to elderly and homeless; work in drop-in shelters for women; respite care; volunteer nursing in free clinics; sitting meditation with inmates at Michigan City Federal Prison. She is married and has two daughters and a son.

Amy K. Levin is Director of Women’s Studies, Chair of the Museum Studies Committee, and Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. Levin was the first Literature and Medicine facilitator in Illinois, beginning in 2003. She currently facilitates two groups, one at Central DuPage Hospital in the Chicago suburbs, and one at Kishwaukee Hospital in DeKalb, Illinois.

Levin’s awards and recognition include receiving a Faculty Achievement Award from Central Missouri State University and the first Outstanding Mentor Award from the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women at NIU. She has also completed a fellowship from the Ford Foundation to conduct research on Africanisms in African-American culture and literature.

Levin’s research focuses on literature by women as well as race, class, and gender in museums. She has published three books: The Suppressed Sister: A Relationship Among Women in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Novels by British Women (1992); Africanism and Authenticity in African American-Women’s Novels; and an edited collection of articles, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities (2007). In addition, she has published numerous poems and translations in small magazines.

Laurie Quinn is Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Granite State College, the University System of New Hampshire’s college for working adults. Laurie teaches British Literature, Women’s Literature, writing, and various other courses as a member of the college’s adjunct faculty. A facilitator in the Maine Humanities Council’s Literature & Medicine program for five years and an Institute faculty member in 2006, she also ran the New Hampshire Humanities Council’s version of the program when she served as Senior Program Director there. Laurie’s doctorate is in English literature, and she earned her M.A. and B.A. from Boston College. Her interests include social class issues in literature, feminist literary traditions, modern British literature, and contemporary British and American poetry. She lives in Portsmouth, NH with her husband and their young son.

Greg Waters is a professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey and director of the University Honors Program. He recently returned to the English Department after twenty years in university administration, serving as Deputy Provost, Interim President and Vice President for University Advancement at Montclair. He received his B.A. from Georgetown University and his Ph.D from Rutgers. He has written scholarly papers, articles and reviews on topics ranging from 16th century prose style to modern American poetry, and currently teaches a variety of courses in American literature, rhetoric and drama at Montclair. Currently vice chairman of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, he served as facilitator for a Literature & Medicine program for three years. Father of two grown children, his wife teaches fourth grade in an urban school.

Victoria Bonebakker joined the Maine Humanities Council as Associate Director in 1997 when the Council merged with the Maine Collaborative for Education in the Arts & Humanities, where she had been director for eight years. In previous incarnations she taught elementary school French in Washington D. C. and San Francisco, practiced law in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and taught law at UCLA Law School. Her “outside” interests include her family (husband, two grown children and their spouses, grandson and one dog) cooking for friends and family, reading, Chebeague Island, sailing, traveling and friends. Currently she serves on the board of Portland West. Victoria received her A.B. Vassar College (French and Art History) and her J.D. from Hastings College of Law (University of California).

Betsy Burtis is the Manager of Training and Development at a 188-bed hospital in New Hampshire. She is a voracious reader and a member of a book discussion group who believes that discussing issues in books allows people to share thoughts and information about themes that they might not be able to share or even articulate if it was their own personal experiences. She has been a liaison for the Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® program at her hospital.

Christine Frank is the Director of the Library of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. A newcomer to the Literature and Medicine program, she has served as co-liaison for the program at Rush since Summer, 2007. Chris holds a B.A. in English Literature and an M.L.S., both from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is a member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals and has been with Rush for thirty one years. Chris dabbled in the concept of combining the arts and medicine about twenty years ago when she helped organize a series of feature film showings and discussions with one of Rush’s chief Psychiatry residents. Chris spends her days at work dealing with anything from budgets to copyright to moldy rare books to implementing new library computer systems. At home, she participates in a multigenerational household, sharing a home with her husband, law school daughter, autistic son, mother, and mother-in-law.

Elizabeth Motts is Program Officer at the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. She oversees Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® and the Council’s grant program. Before joining NJCH, she worked at the Illinois Humanities Council as Public Information Assistant. Elizabeth’s background includes work in the arts as a volunteer coordinating a leadership and succession conference for arts professionals, and as an intern in arts education at the Court Theatre in Chicago. She also has several years of experience as a paralegal in the area of commercial finance. She received a Master of Arts in the Humanities from the University of Chicago (2001) and a Bachelor of Arts with distinction in History from the University of Michigan (1995).

Lizz Sinclair has been a Program Officer for the Maine Humanities Council for the past ten years, directing the Let’s Talk About It program for libraries and organizing Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®. With Literature & Medicine she works closely with healthcare professionals, scholars and colleagues at other humanities councils in her role as a trainer and mentor for the program in Maine and nationally. Lizz is the editor of Synapse, Literature & Medicine’s e-zine and can be found painting when not at the Council.

It has never been recorded that any child ever declared: “I want to be a librarian when I grow up.” Julie Stielstra sure didn’t. But she has been a library habituée all her life, starting in utero, and more or less fell into public library work to support her Bachelor’s in Art History from the University of Michigan. Contrary to popular belief, the art history degree actually did eventually get her a job in the library of the Cleveland Museum of Art after spending several years as a licensed small animal veterinary technician. Since library work turned out to be fairly congenial and she was good at it, she decided to get the Master’s degree in Library Science and make some real money. Her veterinary training laid the foundation for finding a way into medical librarianship (a spleen’s a spleen, no matter what species), and she’s been running hospital libraries in the Chicago area ever since. It pays the mortgage and for food for six cats, one very fine American Natural Dog, one useless and utterly adored blind Italian Greyhound, and two horses, and for occasional binges at Borders and amazon.com, where she is very grateful for the “17 used copies starting at $2.37” feature. (She used to buy books in Ann Arbor, Michigan in a narrow little storefront where the owner worked the cash register; his name was Tom Borders.) She is the liaison for the Central DuPage Hospital (Winfield, IL) Literature & Medicine program, butting heads with the conference room reservation clerk since the program began in Illinois in 2003.